Until Dawn

• 1. Introduction

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  Until Dawn is a 2015 horror game in which eight young adults must outlast one terrible night on Blackwood Mountain. Partway through the evening, two of them reach a radio tower and get a reply. It is not the reply they wanted. A storm means no rescue can come before morning, so the only goal left is to stay alive until dawn. Supermassive Games developed the game, and Sony Computer Entertainment published it. Yet it began as something quite different, built around a motion controller and a flashlight beam. How did an idea that many early fans did not want to pay for turn into a surprise success? And what is actually hunting these eight people in the dark?

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• 2. The Night on Blackwood

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  A cruel prank at a party in her family's lodge sends Hannah Washington running into the woods of Blackwood Mountain. Her twin sister Beth, played by Ella Lentini like Hannah, chases after her and finds her. Then a stranger with a flamethrower comes after both girls, and they tumble off a cliff. Searchers never find their bodies, and the sisters are declared missing. The stranger is played by Larry Fessenden, who is also one of the game's two writers.

  A year later, the twins' brother Josh, played by Rami Malek, invites the old party group back to the lodge. Sam Giddings, played by Hayden Panettiere, was Hannah's friend. Chris Hartley is Josh's friend and has a crush on Ashley Brown. Emily Davis and Matt Taylor are a couple. Mike Munroe is Emily's ex-boyfriend, and he now dates Jessica Riley. Tensions run high and several of them have doubts, yet all seven accept. They ride a cable car up the mountain and then drift off to separate activities.

  As the night wears on, Mike and Jessica slip away to a guest cabin, and an unseen figure abducts her. Mike follows the captor to an abandoned sanatorium. There he finds documents about a cave-in in 1952 that trapped a group of miners. He watches the elevator carrying Jessica plummet and believes she is dead, though her real fate depends on the player. Meanwhile a masked man terrorizes Josh, Ashley, Chris and Sam inside the lodge. Josh seems to die in a torture device. The masked man later orders Chris to shoot either Ashley or himself, with saw blades threatening both.

  Elsewhere, Matt and Emily find the cable car locked and head for a radio tower. An unknown creature topples the tower into the mines and separates them. Emily wanders to the spot where the twins fell, and she finds Beth's severed head. A creature then chases her out of the mines.

  Mike reunites with Sam, and the masked man unmasks himself as Josh. He says he staged everything as a revenge prank for his sisters' presumed deaths, and he denies harming Jessica. Mike locks him in a shed to wait for the police. The real explanation arrives with the Stranger, who confronts the survivors at the lodge. He says the creatures are wendigos, former humans who turned feral after resorting to cannibalism during the 1952 cave-in. When Chris and the Stranger go to fetch Josh, the shed is empty. On the way back, a wendigo kills the Stranger, and possibly Chris too. Emily, if she was bitten during her escape, may be shot by Mike out of fear of infection.

  Sam and Mike eventually find Josh in the mines, where his deteriorating mind conjures visions of his lost sisters. A wendigo attacks him, and he dies unless Sam has gathered enough clues to understand the truth. The lead wendigo is Hannah. She survived the fall and transformed after eating Beth's remains. When Hannah and the other wendigos overrun the lodge basement, a fight among them causes a gas leak. Mike and Sam ignite it, and the explosion destroys the lodge. It kills Hannah and the other wendigos, and possibly some of the group. Rescue helicopters then arrive for whoever is left.

  In the closing credits, the survivors are interviewed by police, and at least one urges them to search the mines. If Josh lived through Hannah's attack, the police later find him eating the Stranger's head as he becomes a wendigo himself. The remake adds a scene set years later in Los Angeles, where a medicated Sam has a bleeding scar on her arm and an unknown voice speaks at her door.

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• 3. Cameras and Controllers

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  London Studio worked on the project from 2008 to 2010, a fact that only came out in 2024, before Supermassive Games took over its development. The game first became public when someone discovered a trademark for the title. Supermassive wanted a story-driven game for the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Move accessory, with more emphasis on narrative than its earlier work, such as Start the Party!. The pitch was a horror game that resembled a slasher film, aimed at the younger audience Sony had courted with the Move.

  In that first version, nothing worked without the wand. Moving it swung the flashlight beam the characters carried through a first-person view. The wand also handled objects and puzzles, and players sometimes wielded a firearm. An early build even supported two-player cooperative play, aimed at young couples in their twenties.

  A segment shown at Gamescom 2012 drew positive comments from the gaming community. The most common complaint, though, was that most people did not want to buy a controller for one game. The project had reached its alpha stage by then. Around that time a developer named Byles experimented with the debug camera and saw what a third-person view could do. It would make the game feel more "cinematic". The game then moved from the PlayStation 3 to the PlayStation 4 and grew more mature in content, now targeting older players. Most characters were recast. Brett Dalton, one of the actors kept from the earlier version, believed the studio wanted better-known names.

  The studio partnered with Cubic Motion and 3Lateral to capture the actors' performances. It also adopted the Decima engine from Guerrilla Games and reworked the lighting system. Particle effects and volumetric lighting lit the environments. The camera became fixed, much like in early Resident Evil games, and the designers first resisted that choice because they considered it "archaic". Byles and production designer Lee Robinson answered with storyboards showing that every angle served the story. Quality assurance testers were still frustrated at first. Supermassive responded by avoiding drastic camera jumps at thresholds like doors, and it cut some scenes to make that rule work.

  Once the Move requirement vanished, the flashlight-pointing mechanic stopped being engaging. The team overhauled the gameplay and took cues from Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, which pushed Until Dawn toward being an interactive movie.

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• 4. The Butterfly Effect

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  Twenty-two critical choices feed into hundreds of possible endings in Until Dawn. The designers called the underlying system the butterfly effect. Decisions range from something as small as picking up a book to moral choices that decide another character's fate. Some are timed. Certain choices open new sequences of events with unforeseen consequences, and they also shift the story's tone and the relationships between characters. Byles said that "all of the characters can live or all of whom can die in any order in any number of ways". He added that no two players would see the same game, because some scenes lock away once a different choice is made.

  Deaths are permanent, and the narrative adapts and carries on without the person who died. A strict auto-save system blocks players from reloading an earlier save to undo a bad outcome. The only escapes are to restart the game or to reach the end and begin a new one. Byles said the system was meant to be "imperative" instead of "punitive". He also noted that a character who seems dead may have survived. Designer Tom Heaton said that one failed quick time event or one wrong choice would not kill a character directly. It would instead send the characters down "harder, more treacherous paths".

  The game divides into 10 chapters. Between chapters, a psychiatrist named Dr. Alan Hill addresses the player directly, seemingly breaking the fourth wall. He analyses the player's fears and the choices made so far. Action scenes rely mostly on quick time events. One variety asks the player to hold the controller as still as possible when a "Don't Move" prompt appears, so a hiding character stays unseen.

  Players can also find totems, which give a glimpse of what may happen later. A tracking system records every clue and secret found, even across several playthroughs, which rewards players who come back for a second night.

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• 5. Writing Fear

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  Supermassive's own British writers sounded "parochial" to the team when it came to horror. So the studio hired two Americans, Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, who had both worked on horror films. Their script ran to nearly 10,000 pages. The characters began as standard horror movie archetypes and showed more depth as the story unfolded. The writers felt a game could give characters quiet moments to express inner feelings. They also felt that choice changes the relationship to the cast. Players can no longer "laugh" at bad decisions, because they are the ones making them, and each death hurts more.

  The story was written out of order, and chapter 8 was finished first. That produced some inconsistencies. Because of the branching structure, every proposed change meant checking its effect on later events, so Supermassive built software to track the intended story. The team avoided big rewrites and adjusted pacing and direction once motion capture and filming had started. Dialogue shrank as acting took over more of the storytelling. One cut subplot involved a female character being pregnant. It was removed for "proving too distracting from the main story line".

  Byles described the tone as "glib" and "cheesy", close to a typical teen horror movie. The developers studied Psycho, The Haunting, The Exorcist, Halloween, Poltergeist, Evil Dead II and The Conjuring for clichés they could subvert. The pacing borrowed from Resident Evil and Silent Hill, whose quiet stretches without enemies build tension. Some plot points were deliberately vague. Byles called that choice "risky", but he thought it strengthened the horror.

  The team aimed for a balance of terror, horror and disgust. Terror, in Byles's words, is "the dread of an unseen threat", and Supermassive used it most. To check that the game was scary, the studio measured playtesters' fear with a galvanic skin response test, which tracks how the skin reacts to stress. Byles said the game took "horror back to the roots of horror". Tension, not action, was the focus.

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• 6. Scoring the Mountain

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  Jason Graves began work on the music in 2011, and the scoring across three orchestra recording sessions lasted a year. He first spent three hours talking with audio director Barney Pratt to settle the direction. Then he wrote the main theme, which he felt captured the team's goals, and used it as his demo pitch to Supermassive. The score reacted to play and grew louder as the player character neared a threat. Graves blended melodic and atonal sounds. He cited the work of Krzysztof Penderecki and Jerry Goldsmith as influences, and some themes stayed tonally vague to mirror the mystery of the story.

  The butterfly effect posed a particular problem, so Graves borrowed film music editing techniques. He split each track into segments, had the orchestra perform it piece by piece, and then manipulated the recordings in the studio to create variations. For the mountain theme and many key tracks, he used a "goat-hoof shaker". He also leaned on synthesizers as a tribute to John Carpenter.

  Only 30 minutes of themes with melody and chord progression were captured in the three orchestral sessions. Most of the session time went to recording 8-10 hours of atmospheric music and sounds. Graves later combined those pieces to suit different emotions in different scenes. The Decima engine was programmed to decide how the music layered, according to the player's choices. In total the soundtrack ran nearly 15 hours. The theme song, "O Death", was performed by Amy Van Roekel.

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• 7. Sleeper Hit

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  Until Dawn was first scheduled for release in 2013 on the PlayStation 3. After the game was retooled, a rumor said Sony had canceled it, and Supermassive CEO Pete Samuels denied the claim. The game was shown again at Gamescom 2014. Sony did not market it extensively, and most of its promotional effort went to third-party games such as Destiny. On the 31st of July 2015, Sony confirmed the game had gone gold, meaning development was finished. It reached the PlayStation 4 in August 2015, two years after the original target. Players who pre-ordered received a bonus mission featuring Matt and Emily. The Japanese version censored the death scenes. In late October 2015, a time-limited Halloween event added 11 pumpkins as collectibles.

  According to Chart-Track, Until Dawn was the second best-selling retail game in the United Kingdom in its first week, behind Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. It was the seventh-best-selling game in the US and the top-trending game on YouTube in August 2015. Sony was surprised by the praise and by how many players posted videos or streamed the game. Shuhei Yoshida, President of SCE Worldwide Studios, called it a "sleeper hit". Samuels said it beat the company's expectations, though no exact sales figure was ever announced.

  Metacritic recorded "generally favorable" reviews. Jeff Marchiafava of Game Informer said Supermassive had "polished the adventure game formula to a triple-A sheen". Alexa Ray Corriea of GameSpot liked the paranoia that came with choices that risked lives. Chris Carter of Destructoid called the butterfly effect "gimmicky", and Louise Blain of GamesRadar thought most early choices were meaningless. Andrew Webster of The Verge said that the control given to the player made the game "something special". Critics praised the world-building, the characters and the cast, and they singled out Peter Stormare as Dr. Hill. Blain and Mollie L Patterson both called it a "love letter" to horror films. Many reviewers found the quick time events and the "Don't Move" prompt well handled. Several criticized the cumbersome controls, and Patterson suggested the Move origins might be the cause. Lucy O'Brien of IGN complained that the game's tone was inconsistent.

  Awards followed. The game was nominated for PlayStation Game of the Year at the 33rd Golden Joystick Awards and for Best Narrative at The Game Awards 2015. It also drew nominations at the 12th British Academy Games Awards and at the 2016 SXSW Gaming Awards. Brett Dalton was nominated for his supporting performance as Mike, and a nomination at the 23rd Visual Effects Society Awards came in 2025.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Sony revealed a non-canonical spin-off, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, at Paris Games Week 2015 and described it as an arcade shooter. Development had begun halfway through work on the original. It reached the PlayStation VR on the 13th of October 2016. In June 2017 came the announcement of a prequel, The Inpatient, set in the Blackwood Sanatorium sixty years before the original. Supermassive then released a spiritual successor, The Quarry, in June 2022.

  A remake was announced in January 2024 and released for the PlayStation 5 and Windows on the 4th of October 2024. Ballistic Moon developed it, and its founders had previously worked at Supermassive and helped make the original. The remake runs on Unreal Engine 5, uses a new score by Mark Korven, and adds an over-the-shoulder camera and a new type of totem called Hunger Totems. It also has an extended prologue, new interactions between characters and new endings, and it remixes the totem locations. On non-PlayStation platforms, the "Don't Move" mechanic was reworked, and a new "Stay Calm" mechanic serves controllers without gyroscopes.

  Metacritic called the response "mixed or average". Critics liked the graphical upgrades and added scenes, but they questioned the price and the performance problems. Several, including Ogilvie of IGN and Will Borger of Shacknews, said the new camera made the game less "cinematic". Borger called it "an unnecessary, technically abysmal remake". Alexander Chatziioannou of PC Gamer still found it "the perfect interactive horror movie". On Steam the launch peak was 2,607 concurrent players, making it one of Sony's slowest-selling games on the platform, alongside Concord and Sackboy: A Big Adventure. In its first UK week it was the 14th best-selling game.

  In January 2024, Sony announced a film adaptation directed by David F. Sandberg. Gary Dauberman did a pass on a script originally written by Blair Butler, and Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions were producing. Peter Stormare returned as Dr. Alan J. Hill. Filming began on the 5th of August 2024, and the film opened on the 25th of April 2025. It reimagines the story as a time loop, in which five protagonists must evade threats until morning. Death resets the clock through an ominous hourglass, and repeated failure turns them into wendigos as part of Dr. Hill's experiment. Audience response was mixed, and so were the reviews from critics.

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